"There's been a lot of speculation recently about the possibility of AI consciousness or self-awareness. But I wonder: Does AI have a subconscious?" For philosophical guidance on encounters with technology, open a support ticket via email; or register and post a comment below. Dear Psychobabble, Sometime in the early 2000s, I came across an essay in which the author argued that no artificial consciousness will ever be believably human unless it can dream. I cannot remember who wrote it or where it was published, though I vividly recall where I was when I read it (the periodicals section of Barbara's Bookstore, Halsted Street, Chicago) and the general feel of that day (twilight, early spring).

In January 2021, the artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI gave a limited release to a piece of software called Dall-E. The software allowed users to enter a simple description of an image they had in their mind and, after a brief pause, the software would produce an almost uncannily good interpretation of their suggestion, worthy of a jobbing illustrator or Adobe-proficient designer – but much faster, and for free. Typing in, for example, "a pig with wings flying over the moon, illustrated by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry" resulted, after a minute or two of processing, in something reminiscent of the patchy but recognisable watercolour brushes of the creator of The Little Prince. A year or so later, when the software got a wider release, the internet went wild. Social media was flooded with all sorts of bizarre and wondrous creations, an exuberant hodgepodge of fantasies and artistic styles. And a few months later it happened again, this time with language, and a product called ChatGPT, also produced by OpenAI. Ask ChatGPT to produce a summary of the Book of Job in the style of the poet Allen Ginsberg and it would come up with a reasonable attempt in a few seconds. Ask it to render Ginsberg's poem Howl in the form of a management consultant's slide deck presentation and it would do that too.

Some artificial intelligences can generate realistic images from nothing but a text prompt. These tools have been used to illustrate magazine covers and win art competitions, but they can also create some very strange results. Nightmarish images of strange creatures keep popping up, sometime known as digital cryptids, named after animals that cryptozoologists but not mainsteam scientists believe may exist somewhere. The phenomenon has garnered national headlines and caused murmuring on social media, so what's going on? One Twitter user asked an AI model called DALL-E mini, since renamed Craiyon, to generate images of the word "crungus".